Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday March 17, 2009 @02:54PM
from the most-rumors-were-true dept.

Apple unveiled the iPhone 3.0 software just now in Cupertino. Here's MacWorld's live-action blow-by-blow coverage. The announcement included new features for developers and users. For developers, the big items were in-app purchasing (for example for game upgrades, map content, and subscriptions) for paid apps only; peer-to-peer connectivity via Bluetooth; giving apps access to hardware via the dock connector or Bluetooth; maps embeddable in apps; and push notifications. For users, there's finally cut-copy-paste available in all apps; search across everything in the iPhone; landscape keyboard; MMS messaging; and voice memos. Developer beta starts today and 3.0 will be available in the summer — free for all 3G phones, $10 for iPod Touch.

I, for one, am not looking forward to being spammed in my apps to pay "Only $.99 for this new widget! Click Now!". I expect everything from EA to be even worse on this platform than it has been to date.

Did you see that FPS demo where the guy had to pay extra to get the rocket launcher? That does **not** make me want to play that game.

The new SDK will allow developers to control accessories attached to the dock adapter. I'm really hopeful someone will make a card reader...it would so nice to bring a 32GB iPod touch on trips instead of a MacBook Pro.

After today's announcement (huzzah cut and paste and Bluetooth connectivity!) I am increasingly convinced that Apple is heading toward pushing the Macintosh off to the side and allowing iPhone OS to become the driver of much of its development efforts.

A lot of the Star Trek-ish utility of the new APIs really becomes laptop-killing functionality when you run this OS on, say, a 10-inch iPad or whatever the thing will be called. The larger form factor **should** negate **some** of the small-battery-killing radio and system activity by providing more space for a larger battery. Then again, Jon Ive does like his devices thin!

And this leaves the Mac OS X... ? Secure in its role as a desktop OS that runs apps like Photoshop and drives complex devices like scanners, printers, etc (for now). But surely Apple is heading back toward the original conception of the Macintosh way back in the 80's - a ubiquitous information appliance. In this case, it's an uber-device that interacts seamlessly with location-aware, contextual user inputs and communication of any sort.

Apple is carefully repositioning our expectations of what we do with our "computers" - and Microsoft doesn't even seem to care.

This only came up in the Q&A afterwards, but tethering is a new feature supported by OS 3.0, but Apple are not making a big thing of it yet because it's going to need to be negotiated with the phone carriers before it can be rolled out.

Considering how they went to great pains to announce individual features of bluetooth that they were using, and avoided talking about bluetooth filesharing, I think they are hinting that bluetooth keyboards are not in the cards at the moment.

On a storm. move finger faster, screen scrolls at the same speed. Flick it and the storm scrolls at the same speed and then stops immediately after your finger leaves it.

On an iphone when you reach the bottom it sort of 'overshoots' its a bit and stops to show you there is no more. On a storm... you hit the bottom and it stops. But it doesn't give you that visual cue that you are at the bottom.

It goes on... the storm has a comparatively putzy touch support. I hear its because finger movements are just mapped to the old simple trackball/wheel commands (up, down, left, right, click) instead of providing a proper touch api to handle all the additional information.

Whether you agree with them or not, that's their position (presumably that of their highly-paid lawyers, too).

Well I, for one, don't agree with them. And I see nothing wrong what-so-ever in raising a public stink about it everytime they do it. Its complete bullshit, and they deserve the backlash for being money grubbing assholes.

My motherboards over the years have been routinely released with new firmware that adds new functionality. As have been my routers. As has my Nintendo Wii. Even my HDTV was firmware updated with new features.

Only apple tries to charge me for firmware upgrades while trying to claim that they have to. I've downloaded all the previous firmwares via p2p and this will be no exception.

I'd actually be inclined to pay for it though, if Apple simply charged for it, and said hey its an upgrade, we feel its worth a few bucks. But instead they've tried to raise some bullshit rationalization that they are legally obligated to charge for it.

FlashJavascriptAdblock (the smallest pipe of any of my computers, this should be #1 priority)Finer control over volume of alertsTime based silent mode for some alertsBetter icon managementHierarchical icon paradigm (over 15,000 apps and I can only have 148 of them currently)

The really interesting thing in the announcement I thought was a hint that there might possibly be some low level of bacground apps. They were not clear on what they meant but this is a big deal.

People have complained there is no flash. At first I assumed, like most folks, this was because apple was stiffing adobe. Then after I started programming for iphone I got a glimpse of why I think there is no flash.

Basically there can only be one app runnning and resident at a time. When you switch between apps and then come back to say safari, it comes back to where you left it so from your point of view it looks like safari was resident and running while your attention was elsewhere. But this is not the case.

It's a clever illusion. Apps have to manage their own persistence. So to make it seem like that safari or any app has to save and restore it's complete state. And the apple iphone rules require this all has to happen in under 5 seconds or you get a kill -9 applied to your slow ass.

Now imagine safari is also running flash under the hood. It does not have the flash internal sate that it can save and restore so how can safari persist a flash system across sessions? It could try a desperation move and try sweeping out the memory as an image. But that won't work since it won't have permission from the OS to do that. Even if it did have permission, then what if flash is storing things on disk, how is safari supposed to keep all the file handles open across sessions?

You could probably come up with some workaround kludges but it would not be pretty.

And then there's that 5 second problem. If safari has to load and resotre it's state almost instantly, you don't want it having to speculatively reload flash every session start just because at some point in your browsing history you opened a flash web site. You'd have a really annoying end result of delaying the application swap for everyone by a second or two every time.

So you can see it's not as simple as it sounds due to the one-app resident at a time rule.

since the iphone has no Virtual memory, you can't just let it be resident and not running either.

thus you can see allowing background apps is not something to do lightly or get yourself locked into (like for example, windows CE) and have to have a task and memory management the user must control.

Not entirely true. Most of Apple's apps do run in the background. Safari is one example of this. As long as nothing else needs memory that Safari is taking up, it will keep running. Running as in being in memory - It doesn't run scripts and stuff.

Dude are you serious? Nokias have been able to cut and paste for years. My Ericsson W910i can cut and paste any piece of text I want, anywhere. It even does it with a decent UI, I merely open up my options menu, tell it I want to mark some text, click the start and the end of my desired text, and it copies it. then I can paste it wherever. Its a $100 phone with no keyboard! Its not 'smart' but I tell you what, it has HDMI, a web browser, a better camera than the iPhone that can take video, and its a decent mp3 player, and it can cut and paste with extreme ease, it even has a very similar predictive text system to the iPhone.

But its not an iPhone, its just a cheap ass middle of the road free on a basic plan thing that everybody has. So why, why does it have equal to or better features than the iPhone, a damn expensive premium product?

The iPhone has been dominating Apple's software development strategy for quite a while now. After all, Apple did delay the release of Leopard for several months because they had shifted resources to the iPhone, and both Leopard and Snow Leopard are bringing APIs to the desktop from the iPhone OS. When you consider that Snow Leopard is going further than any other Mac OS X release to kill Carbon (esp. the Finder), it becomes clear that Apple really wants a homogeneous developer environment across all their devices.

The apps still won't run in the background, but yes, that's the intended purpose. Basically, take an IM client as a great example. For most of them out there (Beejive and others excepted, because they're smart), when the app isn't running, you're logged out of the service, and people have to know your phone number to send you messages. With 3.0, apps like IM clients can notify the phone directly when its user has received a new message, then they can tap into the app and get said message. This is how it was initially intended to be, and it'll be nice to finally see some follow-through.

I own an iPhone and I'm very happy with it. But if it's not for you then, hey, fine with me. We don't need any "one product only" markets, no matter what Bill thinks. It's called choice and the most stupid thing you can do with it is argue.

Fanbois: Wireless has been around and will never take off. It is a large capacity, high end MUSIC player. Apple DO NOT make low end devices and WILL NOT make a cheap iPod. Flash is not appropriate for a portable music player, look at all those cheap screen-less devices out on the market.

2004:

Apple: iPod mini: Smaller version of iPod. 4 or 6 GB disk based. iPod 4.0. UI Redesign. Clickwheel. Up to 40GB. iPod 4.1: now with color and photo capability. Up to 60GB

Naysayers:Still no wireless. Still expensive. No video. Maybe a phone/iPod combination would work. Easily scratched. Still expensive

Fanbois: Wireless is a dead end. Video will just render then thing useless, music and photos are what the iPod does. It is designed for a specific purpose. Nobody want to have their phone run out of power on them by doubling for a music player.

2005:

Apple:iPod Shuffle: Ultra-portable iPod. Up to 1GB. iPod mini v2: New colors. iPod nano: Flash based. Color. Replacing mini. Up to 4GB. iPod 5.0: Now with video. Up to 80GB

Naysayers:No screen on the shuffle. Small video screen on the iPod. And it's not a touch screen. Replace the profitable mini, are they insane? The nano scraches too easily! Still no wireless. When is Apple going to make an iPhone? Still expensive

Fanbois: Apple is about well designed products and convergence devices like phone-music players just don't work. Apple only want to release a flash based player that has a screen, see they can do it and haven't need to cut out the screen and compromise quality.

2006:

Apple:iPod Shuffle: Even smaller. Metallic shell. Up to 2GB. iPod nano: New scratch-resistant metallic shell. More battery life. Up to 8GB.

Naysayers:I can't use the new shuffle as a USB stick! Still no wireless or widescreen or touchscreen. No iPhone. Easily scratched. Still expensive

Fanbois: No device convergence. Never. It is an ugly hash and Apple is driven by simple design. The click wheel is all you need, and touchscreens are unusable. Why put wireless on there? Nobody needs it.

Naysayers:I wanted the phone part to be separate. It's only on AT&T. It's not 3G. I can't buy music wirelessly. It's frickin' expensive.

Fanbois: 3G is not all it is cracked up to be, EDGE is enough for anybody. 3G is another needless battery drain. Apple made the right decision and you can buy music on your computer. Nobody needs to by music wirelessly.